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I've been ripping CDs to my computer for a long time now. Over that time, I've used several different tools for ripping, and I have observed that each tool seems to have a different take on tagging, specifically, what metadata to save with the music data. By "observed," I mean that music players seem to sort albums in a funny order, they split tracks in one physical directory into two albums, or they create other sorts of frustrating irritations.

Previously, I wrote about keeping your code relevant when making a contribution to an open source project. Now, you finally click Create pull request. You're elated, you're done.

At first, I didn’t even care whether my code would get merged or not. I had done my part. I knew I could do it. The future lit up with the many future pull requests that I would make to open source projects.

Most people probably don't remember where they, the computing industry, or the everyday world were in 1996. But I remember that year very clearly. I was a sophomore in high school in the middle of Kansas, and it was the start of my journey into free and open source software (FOSS).

Microservices—applications broken down into smaller, composable pieces that work together—are getting as much attention as the hottest new restaurant in town. (If you're not yet familiar, dive into What Are Microservices before continuing here.)

Adding a user is one of the first things you do on a new computer system. And you often have to manage users throughout the computer's lifespan.

My article on the useradd command provides a deeper understanding of user management on Linux. Useradd is a command-line tool, but you can also manage users graphically on Linux. That's the topic of this article.

Previously, I explained the importance of forking repositories. Once I finished the actual "writing the code" part of making my first open source pull request, I felt excellent. It seemed like the hard part was finally over. What’s more, I felt great about the code that I wrote.

Metrics are the primary way to represent both the overall health of your system and any other specific information you consider important for monitoring and alerting or observability. Prometheus is a leading open source metric instrumentation, collection, and storage toolkit built at SoundCloud beginning in 2012.

Product information management (PIM) software enables sellers to consolidate product data into a centralized repository that acts as a single source of truth, minimizing errors and redundancies in product data.

Previously, I explained how I ultimately chose a project for my contributions. Once I finally picked that project and a task to work on, I felt like the hard part was over, and I slid into cruise control. I knew what to do next, no question. Just clone the repository so that I have the code on my computer, make a new branch for my work, and get coding, right?

Previously, I put a lot of blame on impostor syndrome for delaying my first open source contribution. But there was another factor that I can’t ignore: I can’t make a decision to save my life. And with millions of open source projects to choose from, choosing one to contribute to is overwhelming.

In mid-October, System76 made an exciting announcement for open source hardware fans: It would soon begin shipping two of its laptop models, Galago Pro and Darter Pro, with the open source BIOS coreboot.

Given the recent surge in popularity of open source data science projects like pandas, NumPy, and Matplotlib, it’s probably no surprise that the increased level of interest is generating user complaints about documentation. To help shed light on what’s at stake, we talked to someone who knows a lot about the subject: Thomas Caswell, the lead developer of Matplotlib.

"Open" isn't just a way we can build software. It's an attitude we can adopt toward anything we do.

And when we adopt it, we can move mountains.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

The story of my first mistake goes back to the beginning of my learn-to-code journey. I taught myself the basics through online resources. I was working through tutorials and projects, making progress but also looking for the next way to level up. Pretty quickly, I came across a blog post that told me the best way for beginners just like me to take their coding skills to the next level was to contribute to open source.

Awk comes in several varieties: There is the original awk, written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and several reimplementations, such as mawk, nawk, and the one that ships with most Linux distributions, GNU awk, or gawk. On most Linux distributions, awk and gawk are synonyms referring to GNU awk, and typing either invokes the same awk command. See the GNU awk user's guide for the full history of awk and gawk.

"What happened to the September Ansible news roundup?" we hear you asking. That is a fine question! In short, vacations and AnsibleFest. Bonus for you though, dear reader, is more fantastic content. Read on…

If you spot an interesting Ansible story on your travels, please send us the link via Mark on Twitter, and the Ansible Community team will curate the best submissions.

Three months, ago the United Nations asked me to join a new advisory board to help them develop their open source strategy and policy. I’m honored to have the opportunity to work together with a group of established experts in open source licensing and policy areas.

Awk is the ubiquitous Unix command for scanning and processing text containing predictable patterns. However, because it features functions, it's also justifiably called a programming language.

Another weekend rolls around, and I can spend some time working on my passion projects, including working with single-board computers, playing with emulators, and general tinkering with a soldering iron. Earlier this year, I wrote about resurrecting the Commodore Amiga on the Raspberry Pi. A colleague referred to our shared obsession with old technology as a "passion for preserving our digital culture."